This was my first time reading Linda Gregg’s poetry and I found the collection to be incredibly compelling. Her poems range in topic but written during the last few years it is only natural that this collection reckons with humanity and our society’s collective sense of grief, love, rage, and survival.

Two standout poems for me were, “Sleeping Bear” with the line, “So many children, so little space in our rubble-strewn hearts,” and “The Long Run,” with the lines, “There’s always a moment before the moment when nothing is ever the same again,” and “Is it something peculiar to us, do you think, this science-will-fix-it, somebody-somewhere-will-figure-out-the-cleanup way of burning through our one shared life.”

A sobering collection of poetry with a focus on loss, downfall, and mourning. Ms Gregerson paints her world with shades and smells, sounds and palpable emotions. A beautiful, haunting anthology. I plan to recommend this book to our school's English department.

An enjoyable collection of poetry. Thought-provoking, intelligent, and beautifully written. This is my first Linda Gregerson but I do not think it will be my last.

**I received an eARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Big thanks to NetGalley and the publisher!

I really don't want to rate this because I feel like it would be unfair to the author. Simply put, I just didn't <i>get</i> a lot of this poetry. It was very dense and often alluded to (I think) specific situations that I did not have the context to decipher.

Mostly, I found myself confused both with the subject matter of a poem and with the lines themselves. There will always be some formatting issues when putting poetry to e-book format, but one of the sentences I read said:

"I left her to the daily harms I might have seen them coming some of them one of the worst in any case and then but that was different then the illness that had only left me bitten took her altogether in its jaws."

What the hell did I just read? This is of course ommitting the line breaks, but even with the breaks this makes no sense to me. There is no punctuation and it just seems like gibberish. But I'm hesitant to judge it because perhaps the poem got jumbled when being put into this format? Unsure if I am just stupid or if this collection sways back and forth between nonsensical and pretentious.

Perhaps I'll revisit this some day when I have more brain cells at my disposal.

Other than some of the poems about the degrading natural world, this collection didn't do it for me. From the publisher: "From the Syrian refugee and ecological crises, to police brutality and COVID, to the Global Seed Vault buried under permafrost, the poems ask: How does consciousness relate to the individual body, the individual to the communal, the community to our environment? How do we mourn a loved one, and how do we mourn strangers?" - I share this description, because this was actually my major qualm with the collection. The author spends so much time attempting to align the works with an array of contemporary issues, that I felt this was taking away from the poetry itself. For me, the politics don't feel naturally integrated into the works and therefore some of them feel to be a bit of a reach for Gregerson's own artistic voice. While I agree it's important for artists to take into account the social issues of today, I don't think every artist necessarily needs to address every issue in their own work.

These poems will certainly hold up to a second reading. There are layers and often multiple subjects within a single poem. I had hoped for something more focused on nature, while there are glimpses, these are not fully that.

The publisher’s note in the beginning was appreciated, discussing the use of white space for poetry and how an eBook with an individual choosing the font size, spacing and such, makes it unpredictable how the poem line breaks would occur. I kept that in mind as I read the poem, as these stops are purposeful, and Gregerson had long lines.

It is hard to "rate" poetry as it strikes each individual in a different manner, more so than in fiction or non-fiction. Mood plays a big part of reading as well, at least for myself. I find poetry like a meditation at times, and Gregerson's held up to that view.

I may revisit this collection later, but unfortunately, it did not do a lot for me on the first read-through! I liked the imagery, but even after a few days of separation, I am having difficulty remembering specifics. Thanks for Ecco for providing me with an early copy, though! Canopy comes out on March 22.

This is Linda Gregerson’s seventh collection of poetry, following Prodigal, her volume of new and selected poems published in 2015, and it is masterful. Although there is nothing faddish—or even experimental—about Gregerson’s poems, this is a book very much of its time, what some have called “the end of history,” a time of environmental and political chaos. Gregerson was born in 1950 and Canopy is also a book very much aware of the coming end of Gregerson’s own personal history.

In the book’s first poem,”Deciduous,” nature itself—in this case, the maple trees—are asked “to call us back to order before//we altogether lose our way” because “the child who learned perspective” from the trees is “counting the years to extinction now.” What we need to know are “the disciplines of do-less-harm.” But first, the maples suggest, humankind has to choose to do that: “De + cidere,” the maples say, “also means decide.”

Just as the maples are asked to tell us the truth, not just what we want to hear, so does this poet, in poem after poem, ask us to face reality. In that way, Gregerson seems very Midwestern; she isn’t going to coddle you. Several poems address the modern crisis of immigration: “So many children, so little space in our rubble-strewn / hearts.” We “didn’t mean to fail” these children, just like we didn’t mean to fail those we left behind in Afghanistan, or the young soldiers we sent there, but fail we did. Yet Gregerson isn’t putting the blame on others; it’s always “us,” not “you” who fail again and again. There’s always that moment just before the terrible, irrevocable thing happens, Gregerson suggests, the “moment when nothing is ever the same again,” but it is our very human failing not to know that, to think someone else will know it, will fix it, will stop it. What makes these poems so moving is that most often Gregerson brings these ideas back to the personal. Towards the end of “The Long Run,” in which she has been elucidating these failures, she remembers her late father and how much he loved the ginkgo trees planted on the statehouse lawn in Michigan, the old Greek Revival statehouse (an image which inevitably reminds this reader of all the crazy upheaval the Michigan statehouse has seen in the Trump era). She suggests he loved them because they were so indestructible: they co-existed with dinosaurs and one in Hiroshima even survived the atom bomb. But immediately following that image, Gregerson undercuts it by bringing the poem back to the personal and to her own personal failings: “It must / have been unforgivable, the thing I said that made him cut // their visit short. Forgetting hasn’t fixed it.”

To be human is to fail, in Gregerson’s universe, but it is nevertheless to keep trying. That is our only redemption, she implies, a measure of our humanity. In a poem which meditates on our pandemic, she writes, “When I tried // to sign up for the / listserv I was shuttled to another screen / and asked to ‘confirm / humanity.’ I checked the box.” There’s a rueful humour there, too, I think.

This is a very rewarding book. The poet Gregerson reminds me of most is Elizabeth Bishop, in that, as in Bishop, much of the pleasure of reading her is seeing a mind at work. First this, then this, then that, one thing suggesting another in poems that are driven by syntax. She isn’t as immediately clear as, say, Billy Collins or Mary Oliver, but she isn’t “difficult” either. These poems are very much worth reading and rereading. I want to thank Ecco and Net Galley for providing me with an advance copy of Canopy.

This is my first time reading Linda Gregerson's work. It was a lovely collection, easily read in one afternoon. Highly recommend.